Rapunzel and the Tower of Song

Rapunzel and the Tower of Song

Original Fiction by Dale L. Sproule  (Inspired by the ghost of Leonard Cohen echoing still through the hundreds of floors in the Tower of Song)

“Yeah your hair is long and your friends are gold
You’ll party together till you all grow old
And you’re crazy for love and you’re in the world’s eye
They’ll raise their gazes to you
in the Tower of Song” 

You wouldn’t think that autographing 1,000 naked torsos would be such a chore. The first few dozen were cool, but after awhile Godiva was fighting a writer’s cramp that ran up her arm and over her shoulder. The pain was monumental, but she was a trouper. The event was streaming live, so she fought hard to conceal her anguish from the cameras.

Resting at home after the Man-a-thon as her manager had called it, Godiva reflected back on her life:

2000: Godiva’s mom, Evelyn Ghoshi-Smythe, had bagged Johnny Depp outside the set of 21 Jump Street and subsequently raised his lovechild to believe in her innate stardom.

2003-6: “I would never tell, Johnny,” Godiva remembered her mom whispering in her ear. “Cause paternity suits are fucking gauche and he probably gets enough of that shit already. And as long as you know who you are, it’s cool, isn’t it, baby.” And then her momma would hug her and kiss her and cuddle her and call her ‘her little amazon’. She sang sweetly to her at bedtime. Mostly Leonard Cohen’s ‘Tower of Song’, replacing the original lyrics with stuff she’d made up. “Now I know that you are better than the kids out in the hall, your voice will soon be channelled into the bedrooms of us all.”

2007: “You’re gonna live there someday, baby,” Momma promised her nascent superstar, “you’re gonna live in the Tower of Song. Penthouse suite way up in the clouds.”

2009: Momma’s drug problems forced her to give little Godiva up, but the tot never lost sight of her goals. Her sense of entitlement survived the foster homes.

2016: Godiva started recording and engineering her own material by 16, scoring a number of niche hits and buzz trax before breaking out.

Then came ‘Bumbolina’.

The last eight months of her life had gone past in a blur and she hadn’t ended up exactly where she expected.

EXCERPT from Godiva Godiva Bio on Flashtrax Rock Wiki:

About to hit 20 in the year 2020, she’d posted her first collection on her blog and called it 19 in the Shade. It contained 20 trax. When it started going viral, she hired her best friend’s company LaciePR and Lacie did an A1 job of priming the ether.

The press releases were auto-sent when “Bumbolina” cracked its first top 20 playlist. The original vid featured Godiva singing and playing the ukulele on the edge of the bathtub in the tiny apartment when her roommates Lacie and Jonathan weren’t home.

‘Bumbolina – the Amazon Club Mix’ got more than a few downloads. ‘Bumbolina - the Ripped and Wrinkled Mix’ played well to the university crowd after she released her vid with a pair of leathered muscle man and her dressed like an old lady. But it was ‘Bumbolina - the Go-Go Diva Dance Mix’ that caught the world’s attention. The vid featured Godiva dancing provocatively in nothing but a floor length auburn wig. Strategic hair placement got it past all the filters. It was directed by an avant garde film student named Veronica Ahmed – who was also a client of LaciePR, and who lived down the hall.  The vid was Art, and it was as hot as ever seen on the far side of a pg filter.

The album got reviewed on MRU and the RealTime Examiner who both “recommended” and “5-starred”. She got on the cover of newsstand magazines. Her followers list grew exponentially, spiking on her 20^th birthday.

With the acclaim of 20,000 “likes” in 20 minutes, a vision came to Godiva in a cocaine haze. The path to the Tower of Song was revealed. At which point:

• Lacie hired 2 extra consultants to manage the Godiva’s image on social media.
• Godiva was signed by We-We and her brand went wild on You Tube.
• Her break-out track peaked at number three in North America and number one in Japan, Western Europe, and Australia, where it stayed on the charts for over 11 weeks. Globally, there was upwards of 2 million downloads in the first 20 days. 
• Her follow-up, “Poke Me With Your U-Tube” came out 3 weeks later, ruled the Pacific Rim, and broke her out in South Africa, South Asia and Brazil.
• Tickets for her tour went on sale worldwide and she filled select nightclubs and concert halls on five continents.

On the acclaim of 60 million “likes” in a day and a half, public naughtiness became both an obligation and an opportunity. For the months leading up to 2022, she couldn’t fill a shot glass or snort a line without sending party-girl ripples through the blogosphere.

Before she knew it, she was rump-romping with a professional poker player named Rod Bertuzzi and his two of his golfing buddies in a hotel in Dallas. Turned out that double penetration was a total buzz killer – at least for female aspirants to the pop pantheon.

Her follow up collection “2 HOT 2 Care”, was stillborn and Lacie was furious. “You ruined it!” she cried.

“How did I know those assholes had spy cams all over room?” Godiva protested.

“They weren’t spycams,” Lacie insisted “You were just too wasted to notice your new boyfriends passing around the camera.”

Godiva shrugged and offered up a squeaky protest. “What can I do?”

Lacie suggested damage control mode. They would play up her notoriety by releasing the second vid “Crazy 4 Love”, with a cgi simulation of her 69ing herself. They were hoping that by suggesting that she was singing into her own pussy, they could swing even that past the censors. But it didn’t work. They didn’t like the way she licked her lips.

So they had softcore and hardcore versions in the can just in case. As Lacie promised, she didn’t even have to show her own naughty bits, because they were looping her head and shoulders with the legs and torso and vagina of someone else. Godiva had insisted on a male fluffer to keep her in a state of excitement.

It worked after a fashion. The Mix featured moans and squeals from a lesbo double creamer called “Call Girls Can Can-Can and the hardcore vid was viewed by almost a quarter of a million patrons of a porn site called Vukkake.

On the strength of three million views and half a million high-def downloads, her career veered sharply away from the target and landed in the lobby of a tower down the street.

The Tower of Dong, Godiva called it.

She did seven straight pornos over the next three weeks and reached the penthouse in record time. Her apartment looked out over the Tower of Song – where she yearned to be, but knew she would never now be welcome. As far as the world was concerned, she was now a porn star.

If anything, the change of artforms quadrupled her fan mail. Problem was, all of them read pretty much the same these days. The subjects lines were all variations on “Luv ur Big Natchurals” or “Ride my Boner” or “IwannaCum in ur Fcae”. And at least half of them contained web cam photos of penises.

But the correspondence from HankWilliams16 was different. Or at least sorta different.

In the first place, his e-mail handle was straight out of Leonard Cohen’s original ‘Tower of Song’. That had to be a sign from above. Could the 27 angels be far behind?

His subject line on the first e-mail she noticed was “UR Musik makes me cum”. It was the first one mentioning her music. And the msg was more than one line long, which distinguished it from the others.

“I fell in love with U as Godiva,” it began. “Poke Me was the gratest song ever. U R the gratest singer who ever lived,” it added before launching into a graphic description of how he wanted to express his adulation.

Focusing on the positive, Godiva answered back. “Thank U 4 remembering my songs,” she said. “It means so much to me.”

And it did! It was like a life line, reminding her that first and foremost, she was a singer/songwriter. So she decided to reinvent herself. Again.

The more she thought about it, the more sense it made. If she didn’t like where her career was going, she could become someone new. That afternoon, she stayed home from the set of the movie “Fuck Me, I’m Famous” and worked on her music.

She took out her ukulele and sat on the crapper singing random notes into the tub enclosure. Then she began strumming a 1960s classic called “Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida”, ad-libbing new lyrics until she found a groove. Three hours later, she finished a song called “Letting My Hair Hang Down” and e-mailed the raw cut to HankWilliams16.

“I wrote it 4 U” she put in the subject line. Then she waited for a response. And waited, and waited. By the time he responded six hours later, Godiva had almost given up.

His enthusiasm almost made up for the delay. “GRATE SONG!” he began.

But reality set in as she read the rest of the text. “R U going to show ur tits in the vid? U have grate tits.”

Which was what alerted Godiva to the reality that if she was going to reinvent herself, she had to do it from scratch.

She tweaked the timbre of her voice, lowering it a couple of octaves and do-wopping around the lower registers until she achieved a John the Revelator rhythm. Layering it over the instrumental trax from Boney M’s Rasputin at one third speed, she concocted the cookingest, weirdest lullaby ever made.

She got a new g-mail account, as JohnRasputin33, then started premiering the song on her new social media accounts.

“Lady Let Your Hair Hang Down” reached top 10 in the Pacific Rim and hit number 3 in the UK.

Lacie would have wanted to cgi a gender change in the vid and developed a whole new female fan base but that wasn’t Godiva’s instinct. Instead she hired a very cool actor with great pecs and blonde dreadlocks to lip synch the vid while she played Rapunzel. The dance mix featured Godiva as guest singer, and won her back some credibility.

In the vid, they tightrope-walked between two towers, to the chorus, “crazy 4 love, crazy 4 love, crazy 4 love”, as people stream into her room at the tower of song to welcome her. She made sure to hire HankWilliams16, as one of the backup singers. His only chorus, Mmmm, tits” was buried in the mix.

And that friends is how Godiva legacy as the most downloaded multi-persona artiste in the history of the planet began.

Many believe that it defines the not-so-clear-eyed 20/20s.